Member

The second element of practical decision-making for planning applications is that the Government appear to want to determine the membership, through numbers and size, of a planning committee. In my own authority of Kirklees, in West Yorkshire, the chief planning officer has tried to get brownie points by jumping ahead and persuading the council to accept that seven out of 69 council members are sufficient to make decisions on major planning applications. I have always argued that I thought that it was not right to have seven council members representing a geographically large area, with a population of nearly half a million, that is demographically diverse and geographically challenging, given where it sits in the Pennines.